Blog

Benefits of Thinking the Unthinkable Post at Harvard Business Review

Rita McGrath’s most recent post Benefits of Thinking the Unthinkable at the Harvard Business Review has been published. An excerpt is below.

“My colleague Gökçe Sargut and I are doing some work on how executives can improve the way their organizations operate under conditions of complexity. As we did the background research, I was fascinated by counterintuitive thinking from Aaron Wildavsky, a well-known social scientist. He argued that when facing risks, organizations have two basic possible responses. Systems can be designed to stave off risks, or they can be designed to be resilient, so that when terrible things happen the system can respond. Most organizations are heavily biased toward risk prevention: we create systems so risk-averse that we truncate learning, sometimes even increasing the very risks we’re trying to avoid.”